A cut above

A cut above

Among the awards offered at the university level, one of the most distinguished and
celebrated is the UCI Alumni Association’s Lauds and Laurels Awards. Comprised of
18 individual honors for staff, faculty, students and alumni, the Lauds and Laurels
have been celebrated for 46 years now. Among this year’s recipients are three representatives
from the School of Social Sciences, including Outstanding Graduate Student Dana Moss.

Moss—whose hard work and dedication to her studies made her an obvious candidate for
the award—comes from a unique academic path. She grew up outside of Washington D.C.
and completed her B.A. at Loyola College (now Loyola University) in Baltimore. After
earning her bachelor’s, she moved to Philadelphia with her future husband and began
working as a research associate in the Department of Sociology at Villanova University.

“It was a really great position because I got to learn a lot about the day to day
of being a sociologist through the lens of a staff support person,” she says.

It was during this job that Moss was presented with the opportunity of earning her
M.A. from Villanova. Because they did not offer a sociology graduate program—her first
choice—she decided instead to work toward her master’s in liberal studies, which allows
the student to design their own multidisciplinary degree. Villanova has a number of
faculty whose research focuses on Middle Eastern politics and history, and Moss found
herself drawn to the discipline due to her budding interests in the region.

In fact, she became so interested in the culture and history of the Middle East that
she and her husband took an extended trip to Yemen to study Arabic in 2009. This eventually
led to their co-founding of the Yemen Peace Project—an organization dedicated to advocating
on issues of U.S. foreign policy toward Yemen, and promoting awareness about the country
through films and art—that her husband, Will Picard, still runs today.

Upon the completion of her first master’s, Moss decided to continue on to earn her
M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology, focusing on social movements in the Middle Eastern region.

“I studied stratification and social problems as an undergrad and found it to be extremely
depressing,” she says. “It’s very hard, day in and day out, to grapple with issues
of systemic inequality, sexism, and racism. So I decided that I wanted to understand
how people contest their circumstances and try to change them.”

Upon her acceptance into top graduate programs across the country, she carefully examined
each one and concluded that the best place to do such research was UCI.

“I believe that UCI has the best program in the study of social movements out of anywhere,”
Moss says. “There are 14 faculty members who study social movements in one form or
another in the department, and that’s just unprecedented.”

So she and her husband made the long trek from Philadelphia to Southern California
with dogs in tow—a decision she couldn’t be happier with.

Moss has certainly made the most of her six years here. She has earned nearly 20 fellowships
and awards in that time and is a self-described workaholic. But she believes the effort
has been worthwhile, and she is making an impact with her work already. Her current
research—which earned her the National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation
Improvement Grant and the Department of Sociology’s Outstanding Research Award—examines
the role that diasporas played in the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011. Specifically,
her work compares the mobilization of Libyan, Yemeni and Syrian diasporas in the U.S.
and Great Britain.

She’s been published in several peer-reviewed journals to date, with several articles
forthcoming and additional works being published in places like The Washington Post. In 2014, her co-authored article with Distinguished Professor of sociology David
Snow was published in the American Sociological Review, and—that same year–she was published in Mobilization: An International Quarterly, the leading journal in the study of social movements. Recently, an article she wrote
addressing the reluctance of Middle Eastern diasporas to speak out against dictatorships
in their home countries (for fear of retaliation against their families back home)
was accepted into the sociological journal Social Problems, a top generalist journal in the field.

She’s hopeful that by getting her findings published, they will be able to play some
role in bringing under-studied social dynamics to light. .

“I really hope my work is interesting to other sociologists and raises some provocative
questions,” she says. “I was just contacted by researchers in Canada who want to
help Syrian refugees and had found one of my papers; they want me to discuss policy
implications with them and how they can apply some of these ideas to assist Syrian
refugees in Canada. That is a sociologist’s dream; that anybody in the policy realm
will actually read our research and find something useful in it.”

One would think that between finishing her dissertation and publishing that Moss would
be fully booked, but she still makes time to present her work at conferences around
the world. She recently presented her findings at the International Studies Association
Annual Meeting in Atlanta, and last fall she traveled to the University of Amsterdam
to speak on the Syrian regime’s online surveillance and counter-mobilization during
the revolution.

It’s not always easy to juggle the responsibilities of a Ph.D. student, but Moss makes
it work, in part thanks to the support of the UCI staff and faculty.

“First and foremost I credit my advisor, David Snow,” she says of her faculty advisor
and co-author. “He’s an incredible mentor. He encourages his students to develop their
own individual identity as sociologists, but he will still mentor them every step
of the way and do everything he can to help them to be successful. He’s genuinely
interested in helping his students to discover their own sociological voice.”

She also recognizes fellow Lauds and Laurels recipient, Graduate Student Director
John Sommerhauser, for his contributions to the School of Social Sciences as a whole.

“He not only has to keep tabs on all of us graduate students in multiple departments,
but he does so with grace and with professionalism,” she says. “He has an incredible
amount of responsibility and I recognize how hard he works. I just can’t think of
a staff person who is more deserving than John.”

In addition, Moss is profoundly appreciative of the support of her dissertation committee—David
Meyer, Charles Ragin, Judy Stepan-Norris, and Yang Su— whom she says she can go to
with any problem whenever she needs guidance.

“They’re just wonderfully supportive of me, and they’re tremendous advocates for their
students in general,” she says.

The esteem to which she holds her committee members makes being nominated for the
Lauds and Laurels that much more meaningful to Moss. She recalls not only feeling
honored upon learning that they chose to put her name in for consideration, but also
appreciative that they have helped her achieve a level of success that has enabled
her to pursue a career in academia. Thanks to much preparation on her part and the
support of her mentors, she will be joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh
this fall as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology.

As her time at UCI comes to a close, Moss is still hard at work, but she is also taking
time to appreciate where that hard work has gotten her—both in terms of awards and
her new faculty position at an acclaimed university.

“My joke with my family is that receiving the Outstanding Graduate Student Award
made all those weekends that I did not go to the beach worth it,” she says. “I’ve
tried to pour every single thing that I can into getting this degree and doing it
well, and it really is very nice to be recognized.”

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Moss will be presented with her award at the Lauds and Laurels Awards Ceremony on
May 12 along with the other recipients. Additional School of Social Sciences honorees
include social science graduate student director John Sommerhauser and current U.S.
ambassador to Ukraine and social science alumnus Geoffrey Pyatt.